Apparat

The electronic producer talks about the music of his life, including Radiohead, Boards of Canada, and growing up in East Germany

Welcome to 5-10-15-20, where we talk to artists about the music they loved at five-year interval points in their lives. Maybe we'll get a detailed roadmap of how their tastes and passions helped make them who they are. Maybe we'll just learn that they really liked hearing the "Mysterious Cities of Gold" theme song over and over when they were kids. Either way, it'll be fun.

For this edition, we checked in with German electronic producer Sascha Ring, aka Apparat, 32.

I grew up in East Germany, and we were short on technology. So my father was really proud to be the owner of a turntable. When I was young, I broke his turntable, so he couldn't listen to his Pink Floyd and Roxy Music records anymore. That was a pretty big problem. But I think that' s how I started getting into music and making music as well. My father took me to gigs with him and sometimes to the rehearsal room, and I would just hang out there and watch them rehearse.

Dark Side of the Moon was one of my father's favorite records, which I obviously didn't understand when I was young. To be honest, I don't really have too many memories of hearing it, but I definitely have memories of the cover. The cover is a picture I have in mind from the very early days; it's crazy. Whenever I see it, it makes me think of my childhood.

Pitchfork: Was it frowned upon, at that time, to be in a rock band in East Germany?

Officially, you had to have politically correct songs in your playlist. Whenever you played something else, you had to just hope that there was no one in the audience who would tell the wrong person or whatever. He wasn't even allowed to play a certain amount of western songs. If it was too much, you were in trouble.

My father was in a very small band; they played mostly covers, not the crazy stuff. But they had to go to auditions, and then there were, like, five people-- government people-- they were in front of you, and they judged you, and then you got some kind of grade. Depending on this grade, you got booked to bigger or smaller shows, and your fee was also tied to the grade you got. So if you were a very politically correct band, you played the big shows and got more money, which is quite weird. When I was young and I was at gigs with my father, I didn't know anything about this; this is stuff he told me later.

Again, it's because of my dad. He worked in a company that produced furniture in East Germany. For some reason, they were able to get a big machine from West Germany. My father was an engineer, so he was in charge to service the machine; he was one of the lucky few who was able to go to West Germany. Once, he came back with a music cassette with Michael Jackson's Thriller, and he also brought some kind of brown jogging suit. I was super happy about the Michael Jackson tape, and I listened to it over and over again, and I tried to get my sister interested. But my sister was four years older, and she was already into the Cure and stuff, which became important for me later as well. She was kind of dark, into all this darkwave in the 80s. She was a few steps in front of me.

Pitchfork: How was she able to get the Cure records?

Since she was a little older, she had a little bit more of a network. There was definitely some kind of a pirate network. You could copy music tapes from your friends, but they'd been copied about 20 times, so they all sounded like shit. My Michael Jackson tape was actually an official Michael Jackson tape, and it sounded awesome.

Pitchfork: This would have been the last moment that it would have been hard to get this stuff, right? The Berlin Wall came down, what, two years later?

Yeah, but when you're 10 or 11, a year is a very long time. From our perspective today, you're right. And also I didn't see it coming at all. When the Wall came down, it totally fucking hit us. As an 11-year-old, still a child, I had no idea about this. When it was on the news, I didn't really understand what was going on. A little later, it started making sense to me, and my friends started visiting people in West Germany. I was like, "Daddy, can we do the same thing now?" And he was like, "Yeah, come on! Let's go tomorrow! We'll go to McDonald's!"

Cosmic Baby: "Stellar Supreme"

This was about the time when I started getting into electronic music. When I was 16, I really discovered good stuff like Detroit techno or gabba from Holland. But when I was 15, there was a record from Berlin's Cosmic Baby called "Stellar Supreme", and it's basically a pretty trancey record. But even if I listen to it today, it's slightly cheesy, but it's well-made. I think that's because this guy was more like a classically trained musician. Today, he does film scores and stuff. This was pretty much my gateway drug to music.

Pitchfork: Was this a popular song?

No, it wasn't really popular. Maybe he sold quite a few records, but it wasn't on the radio or on TV. I think I only discovered it because I had a friend who was already 18, and he was kind of connected to the electronic music scene in West Germany. This was the first stuff he found out about. Somehow, I got it, and I was totally into it. A year later, we were absorbing this music. Whenever they sent him records, everybody had it instantly. He did mixtapes, and it was crazy. It was like a virus.

After that, my tastes got slightly more rough and a little harder. When I was 16, 17, I liked more hard techno. I also started DJing myself, and I played raves. We did that in bunkers and Russian military bases because everything was abandoned. I'm from the East German countryside, and we had lots of freedom there. The police didn't know what to do. They were kind of helpless, and we definitely took advantage of this. We made crazy parties. And that's how I got into electronic music.

I was already a little bit fed up with dancefloor techno because I had done it for quite a while, and also because I had a pretty serious rave teenage experience. I did that every weekend, and of course lots of drugs were involved. At some point, it was definitely too much. Right before I turned 20, I moved to Berlin and changed my life. I started doing a job. I went to a company and I learned graphic design, and I didn't really go to parties much anymore. I even stopped smoking. This Boards of Canada album was pretty much the start of my more experimental and laid-back electronic music period.

We already listened to stuff like that-- to early Autechre and stuff. We listened to this when we did after-parties, after the rave, when I was 18. I don't remember exactly the first time when I listened to Boards of Canada, but I definitely remember that my best friend used to have a basement flat without windows and all of us were sitting there, smoking weed like crazy. We started in the morning, and this stuff was our soundtrack. It's kind of hard to imagine if you listen to this music these days. But every time we listened, it it was totally mindblowing. I miss the feeling; it never really happened to me again. I think that was the last time when I didn't understand how stuff like that could happen at all.

Through my teenage years, I was only listening to electronic music. And if you do this for the most important years of your young life-- at some point it just didn't shock me anymore. Of course, if I listen to Boards of Canada these days, I still like it, but at some point I was sick of music like this. I bought a lot of records-- vinyl, of course. Right behind me, I have 2,000 records, and half of it is mellow electronic music. At some point I just got completely sick of it and didn't listen to any electronic music anymore. I discovered Radiohead very late. Hail to the Thief was the first Radiohead record I ever heard. Until that happened, I had no idea that there was other music besides electronic music. Crazy, isn't it?

Before that album, they were totally off my radar; I didn't notice them. I actually bought the craziest music, records that there were only 1,000 copies of, and I knew about all this stuff, but I didn't know about Radiohead. At this point, maybe I thought stuff like this was too commercial, and I'm not interested in that. When I opened up in the middle of my twenties, this was actually the first thing I heard, and it totally made sense. Obviously, Thom Yorke was also inspired by the whole Warp thing and electronica stuff and Boards of Canada and whatever. So it had kind of this vibe; it's very melodic, it's harmonic, it's melancholic, and it's also a little weird. It's kind of noisy sometimes, and edgy and whatever. If you translate the electronic stuff I like to rock music, it ends up being Radiohead, I guess.

I think Radiohead was my start into a world of all kinds of music. From one day to the next, I figured out: "Wow! There's really cool music which is not totally electronic!" I started checking a lot of stuff. At first, the stuff I really liked was post-rock, like Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Mogwai-- and then, of course, Björk. And also I found out about Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and more contemporary classical stuff. This was kind of compatible to electronic music as well, in a way.

Pitchfork: Have you had any interactions with Radiohead?

Moderat [Apparat's collaboration with Modeselektor] played support shows for them last year in Europe. It was pretty cool, actually. It's definitely cool to be asked to do something like this. Also, I think what's really cool is that they also take some risks in choosing their support acts. They always do something weird. They've played a few shows with Flying Lotus, I think.

Not everyone is open-minded. When we played for 40,000 people in Poland, not everybody understood Moderat. So I think that's a pretty cool move to invite a little weirder kind of music to educate the people a little bit. When we played this one song, I looked over to the right side and Thom Yorke was sitting on a case watching the show-- from maybe not the most perfect angle, but you can't really expect him to be outside in the crowd. At least he was sitting there on a case. And it didn't really make me nervous or whatever. At some point, nothing can really shock you anymore, which is kind of a shame.

I started getting back to the beginning, and I became a little sentimental. Funny enough, Flesh + Blood was also one of the favorites of my father. It's not really that I can remember this record from when I was young, but I can definitely remember my father's band playing a Roxy Music song. It was from the Avalon record, which is not the coolest one, but just the fact that an East German band is playing Roxy Music is, looking back, pretty cool. That's also the reason I always thought Roxy Music are kind of cheesy-- I always had it remembered as a song my father's band played, so I thought it couldn't be really cool.

But actually, I really like it. Now, I've started buying all these old 80s vinyl things like Visage and Cocteau Twins and all the old Cure records. That's what happened when I was 30. I started listening to old music because I've never done this. That's what I'm still doing, actually. It took me 25 more years to really listen to Dark Side of the Moon and to understand it.